The Young Ones: alive and well and studying in Manchester

Maggie Brown, whose daughter is about to go to university, shares the horror of TV viewing habit researchers who found students living a "feral" Young Ones-esque existence in squalid shared houses, watching daytime TV. So no change there, then.

In Victorian times social reformers used to visit the East End of London and were shocked at finding people living lives of absolute squalor compared to the more comfortable middle classes just a few miles away in the west end, writes Maggie Brown.

Earlier this week, sitting in the trendy basement of London's Soho Hotel with scores of powerful media buyers and planners, this long forgotten feature of my history degree from Bristol University came flashing back, as I witnessed a flicker of the same horrified shudder, twenty first century style.

This was when Justin Gibbons, founder of Work Research, described what he and his team observed when they were dispatched to investigate the Secret Lives of Students.

The session was part of a big conference on Generation Whatever, exploring the media habits of young people, from six year olds upwards, organised by Thinkbox, a body promotes commercial TV as a medium to advertisers.

Generation Whatever was supposed to be about student tastes in television, because 18-22 year olds, while valued as the rising generation of young middle class adults, are too transitory to be captured by standard Barb audience data, which relies on set top recorders in homes selected to provide an accurate demographic snap shot of the UK population.

Gibbons chose Manchester University, and targeted students in the last week of term in each of the three years of their degree, from halls of residence to student houses.

His team found that students are already huge users of free video on demand and will happily watch repeats and even third helpings of favourites such as Hollyoaks, at the drop of a Pizza Hut carton. But a good part of his presentation was taken up with graphic descriptions of, well, students' squalid life style.

The research showed students had so much spare time they were huge consumers of television. In the densely populated student houses they tended to gather, as a communal act, to watch Hollyoaks or a similar programme as the day finally geared up.

Manchester students started by watching daytime television: Loose Women, Doctors, progressing to Home and Away and Richard & Judy.

They also indulged in cultish behaviour. One student was devoted to the live feed of badgers and owls on BBC2's Springwatch.

Peaktime television tended to be squeezed out because that was when they were up and about. Some lived almost nocturnal lives.

However, was the student houses that really got Gibbons fired up. He spoke of streets of student houses, with identical, grim basements, in which the team videoed acres of unwashed crockery and overflowing refuse bins. These co-existed with laptops, TVs, racks of CDs and DVDs, and trendy clothes.

"They were uninhabitable. In the loo, in a house for eleven people, there was no toilet roll, no seat, no light. It was like Trainspotting. The worst was a flat lived in by four girls. There was a tomato, decomposing, stuck between the cooker and the work surface," recounted a horrified Gibbons.

"The level of squalor was appalling. It was not just discarded pizza cartons on the floor, but bits of pizza. These young people look fresh faced, but they are feral."

Gibbons also said they tended to be right wing, and hoped, vaguely, to use their history degrees or other such arts subjects for entry into a comfortable life, earning a lot, in somewhere like the City.

"This is a strange bit of their lives, they are so bonkers. Nutty. None of them shop, they just eat takeaways. The reason: they are outward looking, but they are also inward looking, they have no cash, they're on the bread line, living hand to mouth, they have to make phone calls to mum and dad when they run out," he added.

He drew attention to a female student who got up, found no bread or milk, so she had sweetcorn for breakfast.

"They live in small communities, they go out on Tuesday nights, not weekends. That's when they get drinking injuries". This was the cue for a shot of a bandaged foot.

They don't do much studying he said, some have maybe two hours of lectures a week. They had tons of time endless leisure, but lived restricted lives.

The researchers were all fired up to knock on student doors at 9 am. That was immediately abandoned. "There was no point trying to get them before 2pm -3pm. They had no idea what they were going to do that night, they would just wander out into the street to listen and to see where a party in an identical grim basement to their own might be going on," according to Gibbons.

"They do think this is their golden age, it's as good as it gets. What a bunch," was Gibbons final remark.

It all seemed to tie in with what employers are saying about recruiting foreign students because they are better prepared. Perhaps student viewers are not so desirable as Thinkbox was suggesting after all?